In press releases and ads, colleges love boasting they’re “military friendly” and “veterans friendly,” and that isn’t just because veterans are usually good students and campus leaders.
It’s also because the newly expanded Post 9/11 G.I. Bill will pay colleges of all types around $9 billion this year to educate nearly 600,000 veterans, and virtually every school wants to expand its slice of that pie.
But some schools touting their spots on proliferating lists of “military friendly” colleges found in magazine guides and websites have few of the attributes educators commonly associate with the claim, such as accepting military credits or having a veterans organization on campus. Many are for-profit schools with low graduation rates.
The designations appear on rankings whose rigor varies but whose methods are under fire. Often, they’re also selling ads to the colleges. Some websites help connect military and veteran students with degree programs that may match their interests, but don’t disclose they are lead aggregators paid by the institutions‚ often for-profit colleges‚ whose programs they highlight.
“They’re not real rankings,” said Tom Tarantino, a veteran who is deputy policy director of the group Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “What they are is advertisement catalogues.” He called for standards to be established for use of the term “military friendly” schools.
There are signs something like that may happen. But as with the U.S. News & World Report college rankings, demand for signaling devices to help consumers shortcut complicated choices could make such lists tough to dislodge. Many experts say the lists are symptoms of a wider problem: Service-members aren’t getting the advice they need to make sound decisions on using the substantially expanded education benefits. It’s no surprise businesses are stepping into that void.
At a large military education conference in Florida, some educators pushed for a sharpened definition of “military friendly” colleges, to be developed by an education coalition called Servicemembers Opportunity Colleges.
In recent weeks a slew of bills on the subject have surfaced.
The latest, unveiled Tuesday by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., is called the “G.I. Bill Consumer Awareness Act” and would push colleges and the Department of Veterans Affairs to disclose more information on questions like licensing and job placement rates, and to develop policies to prevent misleading marketing.
“It’s not only these major lists, but all of these pay-to-play websites that come up with these nefarious rankings,” said Jim Sweizer, vice president of military programs at American Public University System.
APUS operates two for-profit online universities, American Military University and American Public University. It calls itself the largest provider of education to the military, with two-thirds of its roughly 110,000 students in the Reserves, active duty, or veterans.
But last year it boycotted the best-known “military friendly” list, published by G.I. Jobs magazine, saying the system had shortcomings.
“The people who suffer from this are the service-members who don’t know any better,” Sweizer said. Officials at other institutions say they don’t like the lists but can’t afford not to be on them, for fear of appearing “military unfriendly.”
“Some schools feel ‘I’m damned if I do, damned if I don’t,” said Ramona McAfee, assistant dean at Columbia College in Missouri, a critic of the lists whose school still is in the listings.
But for some lesser-known colleges, such lists can get their names in front of prospective students‚ which, they say, expands veterans’ horizons. Last year, when G.I. Jobs magazine published its list, a flurry of colleges shared the news in press releases, and local newspapers often followed with stories.
“We wanted to make sure we were giving them every opportunity and making this transition easier for them,” said Sarah Palace, assistant dean for adult enrollment at one school that put out such a release, the College of Notre Dame in Ohio. The smaller Notre Dame has only about 20 full-time veteran students but hopes to recruit more. Palace listed practices she says make the place military friendly: encouraging transfers, examining military transcripts, working with a local veterans service center.
There are worrisome signs that some veterans aren’t making informed decisions. For-profit colleges have lower graduation rates and in some cases have accreditation limitations. In the first two years after the new G.I. Bill was passed in 2008, they enrolled 25 percent of veterans using the benefits and collected 37 percent of the payments to colleges.
After former Marine Cpl. Moses Maddox finished his first tour of duty in Iraq, he started‚ and ended‚ his college search with an Internet query.
“I looked up ‘G.I. Bill friendly schools’ and it said ‘hey, come to the University of Phoenix,’” Maddox said. He won’t single out Phoenix, which collected $133 million from the G.I. Bill in 2010-2011, but it wasn’t a good fit, and he later dropped out, re-enlisted and returned to Iraq. After his second tour he enrolled in Palomar College in California, but discovered his Phoenix credits wouldn’t transfer.
The G.I. Jobs “Guide to Military Friendly Colleges” is probably the best known list, with annual circulation of 135,000 and reaching more through militaryfriendlyschools.com.
G.I. Jobs sends questionnaires to 8,000 institutions, says it gets about half back, and lists the 1500 most military friendly (it claims that’s the top 20 percent).
G.I. Jobs’ general formula used to select military friendly colleges: 45 percent in one “effort” category, measuring things like flexible learning programs and academic credit, 35 percent for financial effort (including tuition benefits and the percentage of recruiting budget directed to veterans), 15 percent for results (such as percentage of military students enrolled) and 5 percent for a category that includes accreditations.
G.I. Jobs doesn’t disclose a cutoff score or quantify what it takes to make the “military friendly” cut. Its list includes some schools that, the magazine’s own charts reveal, check hardly any of the boxes that comprise the magazine’s criteria for inclusion‚ for example the Academy of Cosmetology in Florida, which doesn’t offer credit for military services, has no veteran-specific campus resources and where just three of the 75 students are veterans.
Such schools may well be military friendly, but their inclusion raises questions about how 2500 claimed respondents failed to make the cut.
In print, the guide from a leading rival, Military Advanced Education (MAE) magazine’s “Guide to Top Military-Friendly Colleges and Universities,” says of its formula only that any college wishing consideration can submit answers to a questionnaire.